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PoS is less proven than PoW and has some edges cases that give many concerns. To say this up front, I own ETH, have worked on dapps on it, and completely supprt
by thesausageking 4y ago
PoS is less proven than PoW and has some edges cases that give many concerns. To say this up front, I own ETH, have worked on dapps on it, and completely supprt the move to PoS.
That said, the fact that PoW has been running the longest and Bitcoin uses it to secure the most value of any chain and it has had 100% uptime for the last 9.5 years, means people naturally trust it more.
PoS also in theory incentivizes centralization of staking over time. It's already started to play out this way way with the top two stakers controlling 46% of the staked ETH on the Beacon Chain. With Bitcoin, because you constantly have to buy new hardware and find cheap energy every single block, there's been a constant rise and fall of large miners.
A related issue is that it's more fragile to government censorship as the Tornado Cash OFAC sanctions show. Bitcoin has had mixers sanctioned and it didn't affect the core chain at all. With Tornado Cash, it's possible that Coinbase and other US-based stakers will have to not validate certain transactions, which doesn’t work in PoS, so they've said they will stop staking if the US gov't decides OFAC applies to stakers (which there's a legal argument it does). It's a bit in the weeds, but basically Bitcoin/PoW works in a fundamentally different way, so miners can filter out transactions they legally aren't allow to process and all that happens is those transactions get validated in a future block by other miners.
One other is that PoS has no deterministic way to recover from a complete outage. If a huge EMP brought down every computer network on Earth, when they come back online, PoW has a clear rule for determining which chain is the real one. PoS does not, so it's unclear what would happen. This may seem like a small edge case, and it is, but trust and security are so important when $500B and growing is at stake that tiny edge cases matter.
- landemva 4y ago> 100% uptime for the last 9.5 years While correct, that conveniently omits the downtime in 2010 and 2013. Why be shady? Edit: three nines is considerably different than infinite nines. Around 2018 there was an inflation bug which was kept quiet until it was patched. It's human to have an occasional bug. Setting the bar too high may be a dis-service if/when there is an exploit.
- thesausageking 4y agoWhat? How is that shady? It had 99.98% uptime since launched and 100% since 2013. That’s one of the most reliable software projects ever created in history.
- Shaanie 4y agoIt's shady because you're cherry picking the dates. Why not say 99.98% uptime since launch from the start?
- ahtihn 4y ago> so miners can filter out transactions they legally aren't allow to process and all that happens is those transactions get validated in a future block by other miners. You could fairly easily argue that building on a chain that includes sanctioned transactions is also "processing" them. Therefore miners would need to fork the chain to remain in the clear legally or just stop mining altogether.
- thesausageking 4y agoThat doesn't make sense legally and regulators have given their blessing to the approach for Bitcoin I mentioned. I personally think even going after stakers is a bridge too far, but in that case the staker is profiting off of the illegal transaction and they're also directly participating in processing it.
- ahtihn 4y ago> That doesn't make sense legally and regulators have given their blessing to the approach for Bitcoin I mentioned. They have? Regulators have made an explicit statement on this? Can you link to it?